African Journal of Virology Research

African Journal of Virology Research ISSN 3421-7347 Vol. 1 (8), pp. 116-119, August, 2007. © International Scholars Journals

Full Length Research Paper

A study of the resistance of Trichosporon cutaneum against toxic chemicals

*Boshnakov Radev¹, Dimitar Chavdar² and Yanev Djankov²

¹Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Burgas Free University, Burgas, Bulgaria.

²Department of Biomedical Sciences, New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

Accepted 03 March, 2007

Abstract

Conditioning of cultures involves growing cells in the presence of increasing amounts of a toxic chemical. In order to investigate how conditioning affects a culture’s ability to resist new challenges, the resistance of Trichosporon cutaneum to various toxic chemicals, before and after conditioning to growth on phenol, was investigated by measuring the capacitance of cell suspensions at 0.4 MHz following a toxic challenge. The results show that cells grown on phenol are more resistant to the influence of polar aromatic toxic chemicals such as phenol (log P_ow = 1.48) and benzylalcohol (log P_ow = 1.1), but less resistant against less polar non-aromatic compounds such as n-octanol (log P_ow = 2.9). In reverse, cells grown on glucose were found to be more resistant against n-octanol, but less so against phenol and benzylalcohol. The results indicate that cells, adapted to be more resistant to one type of substance, may become more susceptible to other compounds.

Key words: conditioning, adaptation, membrane, Trichosporon cutaneum, capacitance.